I realize that you evolve with the genome you have, not the genome you might want or wish to have at a later time; but even with a bit of incremental up-armoring the human face seems like kind of a dreadful mess when it comes to fist-fighting prowess. Lots of relatively poorly anchored teeth, plenty of well-vascularized soft tissue, some of it of considerable sensory importance (like the squishy, squishy, eyeballs, conveniently also located in two of the big holes in the skull, where there is little more than goo and connective tissue between your brain and the wide, horrible, world...
Is this just because "radically alter facial morphology" isn't one of those things you evolve even remotely quickly, or without changing a hell of a lot of genes, some of which have other functions, or do we suspect that there are competing constraints working against, or at least limiting, the degree that masculinized facial features are allowed to make you look like some sort of bio-tank?
While its practicality leaves...much to be desired...(and the risk of a sophisticated adversary snagging the data during transmission thanks to imperfect optics or reflective dust or such would be a problem) the "use a reflective object X light years away as the other half of the most insufferably slow delay-line memory in human history" solution arguably gets the closest to being a fundamental solution.
As far as being a practical solution, it could hardly be worse; but it's basically the only game in town that isn't built on unreliable assumptions about future brute-force speeds, or obfuscation through jurisdiction shopping (as mine was).
What I would be very interested to see (as, to the best of my knowledge, it's never come to court) would be the legal response to some sort of tamper resistant module with a time based rule, rather than a key or password of some kind.
Even in jurisdictions where compelling key disclosure is unambiguously something the authorities can do, the assumption (reasonably enough) is that the goods are either crypto keys or actually-good passwords, and anyone who refuses to disclose is either hiding evidence or has already destroyed it.
If the 'key' is "wait 25 years", you won't be happy; but I've just told you everything I know, and everything that there is to know, about accessing the module. I can't really stop you from taking it and trying to break in the hard way; but there is no possible cooperation you can get from me to open it immediately. Aside from assuming 'considerable displeasure', I'm honestly not sure what the reaction would be.
It is certainly less conceptually doomed than DRM; but your standard tamper-resistant hardware is unlikely to cut it for this situation:
The fundamental issue arises if data retention is a serious concern: for common uses of tamper-resistant hardware, it isn't. It's just being used as an access token of some kind, so the actual secret is largely irrelevant, so long as the attacker doesn't get it. If it gets wiped, IT/customer service will just issue you another one.
With some sort of library/archival project, there presumably is some value to the secret, possibly a large one, and there can't be a credential-issuer(or I wouldn't bother to compromise your token, I'd just mail them a subpoena...), so you can't just destroy the secret casually.
This is a problem because 'zero the secret!' is basically the only response that a tamper-resistant system has available if it detects tampering. If that option is on the table, the attacker must negotiate any sensors and failsafes the designer felt like adding, correctly, or irrevocably lose what he came for. If it isn't, the attacker just has to avoid destroying the storage himself.
Adding time as a requirement just makes things more annoying: RTCs need continuous power, and that's both an avenue for attack(especially if we are working on the scale of human lifetimes, forcing your oscillator away from its expected frequency could shave years off the delay, even in the absence of any other attack) and an area more likely than silicon to fail by accident (you don't want to lose your data just because somebody slipped a counterfeit CR-2032 into the supply chain and it had only 20% of the lifetime you expected, do you?).
So who gets to keep the half that goes on the website? What's to stop them from getting subpoenaed, hacked, or otherwise compromised?
Nothing in principle. However, there are secret-sharing techniques that would make this more practical: it is possible to divide a secret into N parts; but construct the divided pieces such that anywhere from 1 to N of them are required to reconstruct the original secret.
This doesn't solve the problem in any fundamental way; but it does help. You can now control both the risk of the secret being permanently lost(increase the number of parties who have parts, possibly even providing a given part to more than one party) and control the risk of enough parties being compromised to reveal the secret(set the number of required parts equal to, or close to N, and distribute the parts among different jurisdictions, storage mechanisms, and so on).
No perfectly elegant solution; but at least you get to pick your poison.
When you aren't running the one antique kernel reluctantly supported by the vendor, that starts to look like progress...
The price paid for going FOSS is more obvious on the desktop, at least if you need more punch than Intel is going to provide, since Nvidia and AMD both offer something resembling real support to proprietary customers; but once you go mobile, the state of binary drivers goes downhill fast. X drivers are more the exception than the rule, and Android drivers might go from being frozen in the 12th century to being frozen in the 15th century at some point in the product's life, if luck is on your side.
Being part of an 'enhanced' human/robot hybrid will be way more fun than handling things that machines are bad at for peanuts per hour on Mechanical Turk! We promise, because reasons!
I'm not actually thinking of the 'indoctrination and control' outcome (if anything, concerned parents are usually the ones who want Junior to absorb as many facts as his little head can hold, so he can get into a good college and Succeed). I'm thinking more of the "it's usually easier to game the metrics than it is to improve what they are trying to measure" problem.
Consider the example of "The Texas Miracle" in education that was a big thing ~2000: they went with a (theoretically plausible and benign) collection of data-driven and performance driven educational reform strategies and Hooray! results improved on all manner of metrics, success. Except that, on closer inspection, most of the reform efforts had simply gone into cooking the books more creatively, getting problem students out before they took any tests that couldn't be faked, and so on. At best, simply an increase in dishonesty overhead. At worst, actively perverse incentives.
You also have the example of something like medicine, where the perverse incentives surrounding better data are in plain sight: from a research and treatment perspective, better population data and case history data are an obvious win; but making sure that you don't end up having to deal with the real sickies is even better for your numbers(and costs) than more efficiently dealing with them is. Yes, we try to ban this; but bans that run counter to incentives are a bit of an uphill battle.
Finally, we have the general historical example of mission creep. You create a database that juicy and it is going absolutely nowhere, which gives assorted interested parties more or less unlimited time to chisel away at any initial restrictions on its use. That's hardly paranoia, just what happens to every body of data interesting enough to be worth collecting.
Silicon Valley is great if you can do something consumer facing and very, very easy. There are great designers in Silicon Valley, but the old-school infrastructure and blue collar understanding is gone. The people who are really good at hardware have moved to different places in the country.
If you want to do anything with any amount of technical difficulty, go to San Diego, Boston, Austin, etc.
I don't think that it's strictly consumer-facing/easy vs. other stuff; but 'shovelling software' vs. other stuff. Yes, the valley is host to a plague of idiotic mobile-social-app-centric-nonsense-startup-wankery; but part of what makes setting up yet another stupid company to deliver worse-than-worthless drivel so fast, cheap, and relatively frictionless is the presence of actual real work, done by adults, in areas like refining the hell out of datacenter operation.
You certainly aren't going to have a good time doing any sort of nontrivial manufacturing in an area that has just outsourced all that long enough for the supporting infrastructure and understanding to decay, migrate, or retire; but Silicon Valley is plagued by shit software peddlers popping up like weeds for roughly the same reason that electronics manufacturing regions of China have a plague of seriously dodgy hardware clone shops: because they do have the support infrastructure that makes setting those up fast and easy.
Anyone who thought that the virtues of this scheme would be 'self-evident' must be a real pleasure to deal with... I'm just curious whether it's the cluelessness or the arrogance that you notice first.
One minor complication, of course: accruing points for authenticity may be virtuous; but it isn't very useful.
In fact, given that 'security' is the ubiquitous justification of these sorts of programs, most attempts to 'refresh the tree of liberty' will just show up as talking points next time the NSA wants a budget increase, or feels like arguing that the rules against domestic surveillance are compromising its effectiveness.
Yes, it sounds all Serious and tough-minded to tell the chatterers that if they aren't fighting at the barricades, they are just whiners; but it ignores the fact that resistance can be worse than useless. In the case of 'national security' apparatus, violence that fails to leave them burned to ashes, and their toadies decorating the lamp posts of the capital, simply makes them look more legitimate and necessary. Since that level of force is unlikely to be a DIY project, you will, at very least, need to reach the level of whining where it becomes a group effort, or where alternate means become available.
If this is the case, why don't Intel make their mad-crazy CPU as a dual-core, sacrificing the extra cores for a tiny bit of extra single-thread performance? That gets gamers their best possible gaming (assuming the second core runs everything apart from the game itself).
I don't know for certain; but I assume that the volume on these doesn't justify too much customization, just binning and not disabling anything; and that with the 'turbo' arrangement on the newer corei CPUs, you get higher clocks on the cores that are active when some cores are idle automatically.
Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?
Because the target market for this thing doesn't consider that a useful metric, and never has.
For some years now (at least back to the P4 era, if memory serves), Intel has always offered the mad-crazy-overclocker-must-go-faster-edition CPU at the top of their (desktop, sorry Xeon buyers!) price list, usually ~$1,000. This part is always an astonishingly poor value, unless what you want is the fastest x86 money can buy. Most of them go to gamer e-peen setups, they may sell some to compute customers who have some pathologically hard-to-parallelize problem and thus need the fastest single threaded performance they can get, rather than more cores with lower performance per thread but far lower cost.
If you are actually shopping for CPUs, you probably want something like CPUboss, or CPUbenchmark which allows you to do fairly easy comparisons of performance/price (albeit for performance as measured by one or more general benchmarks, if your workload is somewhat atypical, your mileage may vary).
I think what surprised me most was that the issue was so serious: assorted trialware, upsell nag screens, and a default 'metro' environment that was probably 50% ads were expected. Such has been the way of the Wintel OEMs since the days of yore.
Shipping a Windows image too broken to take Microsoft's own updates, though, seems like something that Microsoft would want to discourage, whether by bullying vendors during pricing negotiations, having 'Windows Defender', um, actually defend Windows, or by threatening to withhold WHQL approval if it's a driver issue rather than an application or service.
It's particularly weird because the pool of vendors for core hardware(obviously the world of peripherals and option cards is enormous; but the list of vendors soldered to the motherboard of a low to midrange laptop is likely to be a lot shorter: probably Intel for CPU, GPU, and assorted chipset, maybe Intel for wired and wireless ethernet, Broadcom or Realtek if it's a cheapie, possibly Aetheros or Ralink for wireless. Sound will vary; but be at least approximately compliant with 'Intel HD' or 'AC97', firmware almost certainly comes from one of two or three companies that still do that) isn't all that large, and has an obvious interest in their stuff working with whatever Microsoft is selling.
Bad industrial design, and preloaded shitware aren't a surprise; but I had naively assumed that basically everything critical to Windows working as intended was largely in the hands of either Microsoft, Intel, or the BIOS vendor at this point, so I was surprised that they managed to screw it up.
This could be an OEM issue (Dell and Asus being notorious competent and all); but I am, so far, 2 for 2 on Win8 machines that experience the delightful "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes. Do not turn off your computer" perpetual hang.
Thankfully these aren't mine, just test machines; but it hasn't endeared the system to me so far, even if I did like the UI changes.
There is one notable discontinuity in the returns to scale on corruption: If the entity being corrupted is relatively small and can evade wider attention, corruption can simply swallow the whole thing and stop bothering with hiding.
The Hampton, FL, for instance, is less of a town with a corrupt police department, and more of a corrupt police department with some residents. You know you have a problem if the Florida legislature decides that your town is too corrupt to survive and goes about abolishing it...
Teneha, TX operated a similar racket using 'asset forfeiture' laws rather than speeding tickets.
If you approach the task of corruption as that of being a small abcess hiding in a larger, more or less healthy, body, bigger is better. Even if the absolute level of corruption doesn't increase, more cash flowing around makes skimming a percent here and a percent there more worth the time and trouble. However, if you want to go all out, and achieve epic levels (per capita) of corruption, tiny insular shitholes with low risks of outside interference are a very competitive option.
It's a pity that it came to the point of shooting; but the firefighters should have realized from the beginning how corrosive to their actual purpose that plan was going to be. It's like a doctor getting into the business of identifying druggies and underage drinkers, then wondering why it's so hard to get an accurate medical history from a patient.
We do have public safety entities that aren't also branches of law enforcement, you know... Fire departments the National Forest Service, and similar, are often the ones interested in wildfires; and various flavors of park rangers (some of which do have law enforcement functions, some who don't) and similar usually care about lost hikers.
Now, if you want the things used for law enforcement, I suppose you are (by design) out of luck for the moment; but pretending that preventing cops from having them is just totally taking them off the table is silly.
Eh, LAPD is just the biggest. You think that there isn't a single Orange County burbclave whose rentacops and HOA-pearl-clutchers wouldn't love to have a toy like that keeping 'crime' away from good people like them? It's not quite 'God Bless Joe Arpaio' country out there; but California is hardly a hotbed of civil libertarians.
Now, given the LAPD's storied and honorable history, they are definitely on the list of people who should never be given something that requires a promise of discretion; because they can't keep those; but I suspect there would be others interested in the hardware.
Perhaps they would have sold better with a removable SD card.
The timing probably meant a two-way squeeze: As Google's wholly owned phone vassal, they presumably had an incentive to design with an eye toward Google's objectives(which, based on the devices chosen for 'Nexus' status, and Android's evolution in handling SD cards, apparently point toward a bright and glorious future where your phone ships with enough flash for the initramfs, which then downloads everything else From The Cloud...); but as Google's newly wholly owned phone vassal, it would have seriously soured some OEM relationships if they had immediately been crowned maker-of-all-things-Nexus-for-life and generally showered with favored treatment(and, while Google ownership did induce them to de-shit their "blur" nonsense in favor of shipping decent handsets, which probably saved them from further self-induced bleeding, it wasn't really marked by much overt coddling from Mountain View.)
TFA claims that the Motorola X has sold better outside the US, so presumably the trip to the dock for foreign buyers was starting to become more costly than any savings in getting them to American buyers, along with whatever delta there is between domestic and foreign assembly.
That one does look quite competitive(the only detail I'm not sure about is that the one in TFA appears to have a chip antenna onboard, while the one you link to appears to have only an antenna connector).
In part it depends on what you are looking to do: If you are looking to put a brain and a wifi link on top of an existing project, missing connectors aren't a big deal. You patch in +5v, ground, a TTY to the microcontroller, and maybe a few GPIOs for blinkenlights.
If you do have some sort of USB hosting or routing duties in mind, the price of baseboards will end up biting you almost as fast as some of the sillier arduino shield stacks will.
(With RT5350 devices there is one other confounding factor to note when it comes to prices: It's the basis for a lot of deeply-unfamous-name 'mini router' devices: by way of example, I have a "HooToo Tripmate Nano", I think it was on sale for $15 at Newegg when I bought it. Popped it open, RT5350, USB and ethernet already onboard, 3.3v serial pads, actually labelled no less, on the bottom of the board. Less GPIO, and certainly no vendor cooperation in getting the RaMIPS build of OpenWRT installed; but the RT5350 is a very popular part in some very competitively priced devices, largely from vendors who don't exactly bother to lock bootloaders.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just ask the Irish Elk about what happens if you spend all your time impressing your lady friends and none of it avoiding horrible death...
(TL;DR, you can't, because they are all dead.)
I realize that you evolve with the genome you have, not the genome you might want or wish to have at a later time; but even with a bit of incremental up-armoring the human face seems like kind of a dreadful mess when it comes to fist-fighting prowess. Lots of relatively poorly anchored teeth, plenty of well-vascularized soft tissue, some of it of considerable sensory importance (like the squishy, squishy, eyeballs, conveniently also located in two of the big holes in the skull, where there is little more than goo and connective tissue between your brain and the wide, horrible, world...
Is this just because "radically alter facial morphology" isn't one of those things you evolve even remotely quickly, or without changing a hell of a lot of genes, some of which have other functions, or do we suspect that there are competing constraints working against, or at least limiting, the degree that masculinized facial features are allowed to make you look like some sort of bio-tank?
While its practicality leaves...much to be desired...(and the risk of a sophisticated adversary snagging the data during transmission thanks to imperfect optics or reflective dust or such would be a problem) the "use a reflective object X light years away as the other half of the most insufferably slow delay-line memory in human history" solution arguably gets the closest to being a fundamental solution.
As far as being a practical solution, it could hardly be worse; but it's basically the only game in town that isn't built on unreliable assumptions about future brute-force speeds, or obfuscation through jurisdiction shopping (as mine was).
What I would be very interested to see (as, to the best of my knowledge, it's never come to court) would be the legal response to some sort of tamper resistant module with a time based rule, rather than a key or password of some kind.
Even in jurisdictions where compelling key disclosure is unambiguously something the authorities can do, the assumption (reasonably enough) is that the goods are either crypto keys or actually-good passwords, and anyone who refuses to disclose is either hiding evidence or has already destroyed it.
If the 'key' is "wait 25 years", you won't be happy; but I've just told you everything I know, and everything that there is to know, about accessing the module. I can't really stop you from taking it and trying to break in the hard way; but there is no possible cooperation you can get from me to open it immediately. Aside from assuming 'considerable displeasure', I'm honestly not sure what the reaction would be.
It is certainly less conceptually doomed than DRM; but your standard tamper-resistant hardware is unlikely to cut it for this situation:
The fundamental issue arises if data retention is a serious concern: for common uses of tamper-resistant hardware, it isn't. It's just being used as an access token of some kind, so the actual secret is largely irrelevant, so long as the attacker doesn't get it. If it gets wiped, IT/customer service will just issue you another one.
With some sort of library/archival project, there presumably is some value to the secret, possibly a large one, and there can't be a credential-issuer(or I wouldn't bother to compromise your token, I'd just mail them a subpoena...), so you can't just destroy the secret casually.
This is a problem because 'zero the secret!' is basically the only response that a tamper-resistant system has available if it detects tampering. If that option is on the table, the attacker must negotiate any sensors and failsafes the designer felt like adding, correctly, or irrevocably lose what he came for. If it isn't, the attacker just has to avoid destroying the storage himself.
Adding time as a requirement just makes things more annoying: RTCs need continuous power, and that's both an avenue for attack(especially if we are working on the scale of human lifetimes, forcing your oscillator away from its expected frequency could shave years off the delay, even in the absence of any other attack) and an area more likely than silicon to fail by accident (you don't want to lose your data just because somebody slipped a counterfeit CR-2032 into the supply chain and it had only 20% of the lifetime you expected, do you?).
So who gets to keep the half that goes on the website? What's to stop them from getting subpoenaed, hacked, or otherwise compromised?
Nothing in principle. However, there are secret-sharing techniques that would make this more practical: it is possible to divide a secret into N parts; but construct the divided pieces such that anywhere from 1 to N of them are required to reconstruct the original secret.
This doesn't solve the problem in any fundamental way; but it does help. You can now control both the risk of the secret being permanently lost(increase the number of parties who have parts, possibly even providing a given part to more than one party) and control the risk of enough parties being compromised to reveal the secret(set the number of required parts equal to, or close to N, and distribute the parts among different jurisdictions, storage mechanisms, and so on).
No perfectly elegant solution; but at least you get to pick your poison.
When you aren't running the one antique kernel reluctantly supported by the vendor, that starts to look like progress...
The price paid for going FOSS is more obvious on the desktop, at least if you need more punch than Intel is going to provide, since Nvidia and AMD both offer something resembling real support to proprietary customers; but once you go mobile, the state of binary drivers goes downhill fast. X drivers are more the exception than the rule, and Android drivers might go from being frozen in the 12th century to being frozen in the 15th century at some point in the product's life, if luck is on your side.
Being part of an 'enhanced' human/robot hybrid will be way more fun than handling things that machines are bad at for peanuts per hour on Mechanical Turk! We promise, because reasons!
I'm not actually thinking of the 'indoctrination and control' outcome (if anything, concerned parents are usually the ones who want Junior to absorb as many facts as his little head can hold, so he can get into a good college and Succeed). I'm thinking more of the "it's usually easier to game the metrics than it is to improve what they are trying to measure" problem.
Consider the example of "The Texas Miracle" in education that was a big thing ~2000: they went with a (theoretically plausible and benign) collection of data-driven and performance driven educational reform strategies and Hooray! results improved on all manner of metrics, success. Except that, on closer inspection, most of the reform efforts had simply gone into cooking the books more creatively, getting problem students out before they took any tests that couldn't be faked, and so on. At best, simply an increase in dishonesty overhead. At worst, actively perverse incentives.
You also have the example of something like medicine, where the perverse incentives surrounding better data are in plain sight: from a research and treatment perspective, better population data and case history data are an obvious win; but making sure that you don't end up having to deal with the real sickies is even better for your numbers(and costs) than more efficiently dealing with them is. Yes, we try to ban this; but bans that run counter to incentives are a bit of an uphill battle.
Finally, we have the general historical example of mission creep. You create a database that juicy and it is going absolutely nowhere, which gives assorted interested parties more or less unlimited time to chisel away at any initial restrictions on its use. That's hardly paranoia, just what happens to every body of data interesting enough to be worth collecting.
Silicon Valley is great if you can do something consumer facing and very, very easy. There are great designers in Silicon Valley, but the old-school infrastructure and blue collar understanding is gone. The people who are really good at hardware have moved to different places in the country.
If you want to do anything with any amount of technical difficulty, go to San Diego, Boston, Austin, etc.
I don't think that it's strictly consumer-facing/easy vs. other stuff; but 'shovelling software' vs. other stuff. Yes, the valley is host to a plague of idiotic mobile-social-app-centric-nonsense-startup-wankery; but part of what makes setting up yet another stupid company to deliver worse-than-worthless drivel so fast, cheap, and relatively frictionless is the presence of actual real work, done by adults, in areas like refining the hell out of datacenter operation.
You certainly aren't going to have a good time doing any sort of nontrivial manufacturing in an area that has just outsourced all that long enough for the supporting infrastructure and understanding to decay, migrate, or retire; but Silicon Valley is plagued by shit software peddlers popping up like weeds for roughly the same reason that electronics manufacturing regions of China have a plague of seriously dodgy hardware clone shops: because they do have the support infrastructure that makes setting those up fast and easy.
Anyone who thought that the virtues of this scheme would be 'self-evident' must be a real pleasure to deal with... I'm just curious whether it's the cluelessness or the arrogance that you notice first.
One minor complication, of course: accruing points for authenticity may be virtuous; but it isn't very useful.
In fact, given that 'security' is the ubiquitous justification of these sorts of programs, most attempts to 'refresh the tree of liberty' will just show up as talking points next time the NSA wants a budget increase, or feels like arguing that the rules against domestic surveillance are compromising its effectiveness.
Yes, it sounds all Serious and tough-minded to tell the chatterers that if they aren't fighting at the barricades, they are just whiners; but it ignores the fact that resistance can be worse than useless. In the case of 'national security' apparatus, violence that fails to leave them burned to ashes, and their toadies decorating the lamp posts of the capital, simply makes them look more legitimate and necessary. Since that level of force is unlikely to be a DIY project, you will, at very least, need to reach the level of whining where it becomes a group effort, or where alternate means become available.
Why yes, actually, it is my job to sell microprocessors, and not to ask whether they are the right tool for the job. Why do you ask?
If this is the case, why don't Intel make their mad-crazy CPU as a dual-core, sacrificing the extra cores for a tiny bit of extra single-thread performance? That gets gamers their best possible gaming (assuming the second core runs everything apart from the game itself).
I don't know for certain; but I assume that the volume on these doesn't justify too much customization, just binning and not disabling anything; and that with the 'turbo' arrangement on the newer corei CPUs, you get higher clocks on the cores that are active when some cores are idle automatically.
Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?
Because the target market for this thing doesn't consider that a useful metric, and never has.
For some years now (at least back to the P4 era, if memory serves), Intel has always offered the mad-crazy-overclocker-must-go-faster-edition CPU at the top of their (desktop, sorry Xeon buyers!) price list, usually ~$1,000. This part is always an astonishingly poor value, unless what you want is the fastest x86 money can buy. Most of them go to gamer e-peen setups, they may sell some to compute customers who have some pathologically hard-to-parallelize problem and thus need the fastest single threaded performance they can get, rather than more cores with lower performance per thread but far lower cost.
If you are actually shopping for CPUs, you probably want something like CPUboss, or CPUbenchmark which allows you to do fairly easy comparisons of performance/price (albeit for performance as measured by one or more general benchmarks, if your workload is somewhat atypical, your mileage may vary).
I think what surprised me most was that the issue was so serious: assorted trialware, upsell nag screens, and a default 'metro' environment that was probably 50% ads were expected. Such has been the way of the Wintel OEMs since the days of yore.
Shipping a Windows image too broken to take Microsoft's own updates, though, seems like something that Microsoft would want to discourage, whether by bullying vendors during pricing negotiations, having 'Windows Defender', um, actually defend Windows, or by threatening to withhold WHQL approval if it's a driver issue rather than an application or service.
It's particularly weird because the pool of vendors for core hardware(obviously the world of peripherals and option cards is enormous; but the list of vendors soldered to the motherboard of a low to midrange laptop is likely to be a lot shorter: probably Intel for CPU, GPU, and assorted chipset, maybe Intel for wired and wireless ethernet, Broadcom or Realtek if it's a cheapie, possibly Aetheros or Ralink for wireless. Sound will vary; but be at least approximately compliant with 'Intel HD' or 'AC97', firmware almost certainly comes from one of two or three companies that still do that) isn't all that large, and has an obvious interest in their stuff working with whatever Microsoft is selling.
Bad industrial design, and preloaded shitware aren't a surprise; but I had naively assumed that basically everything critical to Windows working as intended was largely in the hands of either Microsoft, Intel, or the BIOS vendor at this point, so I was surprised that they managed to screw it up.
This could be an OEM issue (Dell and Asus being notorious competent and all); but I am, so far, 2 for 2 on Win8 machines that experience the delightful "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes. Do not turn off your computer" perpetual hang.
Thankfully these aren't mine, just test machines; but it hasn't endeared the system to me so far, even if I did like the UI changes.
There is one notable discontinuity in the returns to scale on corruption: If the entity being corrupted is relatively small and can evade wider attention, corruption can simply swallow the whole thing and stop bothering with hiding.
The Hampton, FL, for instance, is less of a town with a corrupt police department, and more of a corrupt police department with some residents. You know you have a problem if the Florida legislature decides that your town is too corrupt to survive and goes about abolishing it...
Teneha, TX operated a similar racket using 'asset forfeiture' laws rather than speeding tickets.
If you approach the task of corruption as that of being a small abcess hiding in a larger, more or less healthy, body, bigger is better. Even if the absolute level of corruption doesn't increase, more cash flowing around makes skimming a percent here and a percent there more worth the time and trouble. However, if you want to go all out, and achieve epic levels (per capita) of corruption, tiny insular shitholes with low risks of outside interference are a very competitive option.
It's a pity that it came to the point of shooting; but the firefighters should have realized from the beginning how corrosive to their actual purpose that plan was going to be. It's like a doctor getting into the business of identifying druggies and underage drinkers, then wondering why it's so hard to get an accurate medical history from a patient.
We do have public safety entities that aren't also branches of law enforcement, you know... Fire departments the National Forest Service, and similar, are often the ones interested in wildfires; and various flavors of park rangers (some of which do have law enforcement functions, some who don't) and similar usually care about lost hikers.
Now, if you want the things used for law enforcement, I suppose you are (by design) out of luck for the moment; but pretending that preventing cops from having them is just totally taking them off the table is silly.
Eh, LAPD is just the biggest. You think that there isn't a single Orange County burbclave whose rentacops and HOA-pearl-clutchers wouldn't love to have a toy like that keeping 'crime' away from good people like them? It's not quite 'God Bless Joe Arpaio' country out there; but California is hardly a hotbed of civil libertarians.
Now, given the LAPD's storied and honorable history, they are definitely on the list of people who should never be given something that requires a promise of discretion; because they can't keep those; but I suspect there would be others interested in the hardware.
Silly socialist! The risk of agonizing death from some untreated illness just incentivizes lazy poor people to work harder.
Not until the paramedics check your credit history before they check your vital signs will America be truly great again!
Perhaps they would have sold better with a removable SD card.
The timing probably meant a two-way squeeze: As Google's wholly owned phone vassal, they presumably had an incentive to design with an eye toward Google's objectives(which, based on the devices chosen for 'Nexus' status, and Android's evolution in handling SD cards, apparently point toward a bright and glorious future where your phone ships with enough flash for the initramfs, which then downloads everything else From The Cloud...); but as Google's newly wholly owned phone vassal, it would have seriously soured some OEM relationships if they had immediately been crowned maker-of-all-things-Nexus-for-life and generally showered with favored treatment(and, while Google ownership did induce them to de-shit their "blur" nonsense in favor of shipping decent handsets, which probably saved them from further self-induced bleeding, it wasn't really marked by much overt coddling from Mountain View.)
TFA claims that the Motorola X has sold better outside the US, so presumably the trip to the dock for foreign buyers was starting to become more costly than any savings in getting them to American buyers, along with whatever delta there is between domestic and foreign assembly.
That one does look quite competitive(the only detail I'm not sure about is that the one in TFA appears to have a chip antenna onboard, while the one you link to appears to have only an antenna connector).
In part it depends on what you are looking to do: If you are looking to put a brain and a wifi link on top of an existing project, missing connectors aren't a big deal. You patch in +5v, ground, a TTY to the microcontroller, and maybe a few GPIOs for blinkenlights.
If you do have some sort of USB hosting or routing duties in mind, the price of baseboards will end up biting you almost as fast as some of the sillier arduino shield stacks will.
(With RT5350 devices there is one other confounding factor to note when it comes to prices: It's the basis for a lot of deeply-unfamous-name 'mini router' devices: by way of example, I have a "HooToo Tripmate Nano", I think it was on sale for $15 at Newegg when I bought it. Popped it open, RT5350, USB and ethernet already onboard, 3.3v serial pads, actually labelled no less, on the bottom of the board. Less GPIO, and certainly no vendor cooperation in getting the RaMIPS build of OpenWRT installed; but the RT5350 is a very popular part in some very competitively priced devices, largely from vendors who don't exactly bother to lock bootloaders.)